iPad Pro (9.7")

24 Oct 2016

I’ve been waiting for a new laptop for what feels like forever. I really thought Apple would announce the new MacBook Pros at WWDC, but that didn’t happen. Now it sounds like they’ll be doing so later this week.

I still don’t have a personal laptop. I can (and do) write code on the MacBook Pro I gave to my wife late last year. But my wife uses that laptop, a lot. I also have a company issued laptop. But I don’t want to use the company laptop for personal items.

Over the Summer, I decided to buy an iPad Pro. The baby one. The 9.7” one. With it, I also bought the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil. I bought the 128 GB Gold model. I normally buy the black version of every iOS device, but this time I wanted something different. I almost went Rose Gold, but that’s a bit too different.

I have been really happy with the iPad Pro. I’ve been able to do everything I would want to do on a laptop except for write code. I’ve even written the last few posts on the iPad Pro (using Byword). The iPad Pro is the perfect, sit on the couch and surf the Internet while watching TV, device. I use it almost every night as that kind of device.

However, writing iOS code is a huge part of who I am and what I do. I am an iOS Developer. Without being able to write code for and on iOS, I am lost. I hope that one day, they take the Swift app and expand on it so we can write production-level code on the iPad.

Something else I don’t do much on the iPad Pro is game on it. I can play some games, but not everything. In fact, I have a gaming PC (that I built a few years ago) that’s dedicated to gaming. I do play some games on the iPad Pro, but games like World of Warcraft, GuildWars 2, Civilization V (I haven’t bought VI yet), etc need to be played on a PC. Even if I had a nice Mac, games don’t have the same support that they do on PCs.

The iPad has been good for me. So good in fact, that I think I’ll wait on a new Mac. But let’s see what Apple announces first.